


Black Ink

by A_Firewatchers_Daughter



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Child Neglect, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Letters, Past Child Abuse, Past Relationship(s), Past Sexual Abuse, Reconciliation, Season 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:13:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Firewatchers_Daughter/pseuds/A_Firewatchers_Daughter
Summary: When Lix was looking for her child's birth certificate, she found something else she had kept for far too long. Time to finally hand it over.
Relationships: Randall Brown/Lix Storm
Comments: 29
Kudos: 26





	1. 19th November, 1937

Lix Storm was not usually a nervous woman. She had faced war, carnage, politics and revolution with a straight back and a head held high.

And yet here she was, hovering by Randall Brown’s office door on her way out of the building. In her hand was an old yellowing envelope; she had found it while retrieving Sofia’s birth certificate. The intervening twenty years had made the details of this particular letter hazy but she remembered what she had wanted to ask him, and she remembered the ache in her chest as she put pen to paper.

She remembered the decision she had made in the middle of the night, as she had lain in his arms, not to give him this letter.

Her hands shook violently as she crouched down and pushed the aged envelope through the crack beneath his door.

That ounce of courage it took from her left her terrified. She ran to the lift, just in case he was on the other side of the door.

* * *

Randall looked up from his work when he heard footsteps and then a quiet scraping from the door. He got up from his desk and went to the door; he opened it but nobody was there. The only sound was the distant ping of the lift.

Frowning, he closed the door again; as he stepped back, he felt something beneath his foot.

An envelope. An old one, at that. He bent down and picked it up. It bore his name, in handwriting he knew all too well. Randall considered leaving it unopened, but if Lix was giving it to him, it meant she had something to tell him that she could not say aloud. Those were the things that most needed to be said.

He took it back to his desk and opened it carefully. The paper smelled vaguely of wood and polish, like it had been abandoned to the depths of a drawer for too long. When he unfolded the paper, he found that the date – in written in bold black ink – was twenty years previous.

_19 th November, 1937_

_Randall,_

_We have stumbled upon a problem: I am pregnant._

_I am well aware this is not a situation either of us has planned for. It is a role I have never been prepared to take on. Of all the things I am by nature or by nurture, a mother is not one of them._

_What if our child is like me? Or worse: what if I am like my mother?_

_In my heart, I know I am rather like my mother. I am the worst possible combination of both my mother and my father. What makes us different is my unwillingness to accept it. However, there is no escaping the fact that I will be completely horrendous as a mother._

_I need you, Randall. I need you to be good at the things I will inevitably fail to achieve._

_There are things you do not know about me. At times, I do wonder if you can sense them, but you can never know just how awful a parent I may turn out to be. I would never wish to damage our child in that way but I cannot trust or believe that I have not inherited that compulsion for cruelty. It has run so far in my family: my mother, her parents, my grandmother’s father. I am certain that if the dead could speak, they would each have a tale of torment to tell. Each generation passed their own pain to the next and it has shown no sign of stopping._

_You must take our baby. When our child is born, you must take him or her far from me. No matter what I say, you must take this baby away from me. I will continue to live alone. I will make sure the pair of you need for nothing. You are a good man, Randall Brown, and you will be an excellent father._

_I do not ask this lightly. I know you will find it difficult to do, as it goes against human instinct to take an infant from its mother, but you must trust me when I tell you it is the safest thing for your child. I will love our baby from a safe distance, where I cannot bring either of you to harm._

_Trust me. I beg of you, if you have ever trusted me about anything, trust me about this._

_I love you. I love you both._

_Lix_

Randall placed the letter gently down onto his desk and removed his glasses. It did not surprise him that he had a tear to wipe from his face. There had always been something about Lix Storm he could not put his finger on. A lack of confidence in a single part of herself that only those who knew her best could ever find.

He wondered what on Earth had happened to her. What could have made her doubt herself so severely that she would even consider asking him to remove her own child from her care?

All he wanted to do was go after her and ask. He might have done if he had believed he had any chance of getting a proper response, but he knew these were conversations Lix would not – or rather, as he now suspected, could not – have. Even if he never got the answers, he wanted to find her. Hold her and tell her she was wrong about herself twenty years ago.

She would never allow him to do that. Not just now. It had taken a great deal of trust for her to give him Sofia’s photo and documents today. He could not push that too far. To push her was to jeopardise their fragile accord. And, of course, the last thing he wanted to do was cause her pain. She wrote it down because she could not say it twenty years ago; that she gave him an old letter rather than come and talk to him told Randall that the idea frightened her, and nothing broke his heart more than seeing Lix truly scared.

There was one thing he could do, he reasoned. He could write back to her. Open a line of communication. One that was safe for both of them, where they could not see one another break down. Was that what she was after? She knew him so well, after all, that she must have known this would be the solution he would choose.

Resigned to it being the only thing he could do for Lix, Randall pulled a sheet of letter paper in front of him. _My dearest Lix_ , he wrote. He very nearly binned it there and then, for it was too affectionate a greeting. But that was what he felt for Lix, was it not? Though he became frustrated with her refusal to talk about certain matters, his overwhelming reaction when he saw her face was one of love.

It was time for a little honesty. If she could do it, so could he.


	2. The Wind

Lix managed to avoid Randall for the earlier part of that morning. She did not wish to see the look in his eyes now that he knew just what a terrible person she was. It had been an idiotic rush of bravery that induced her to give him that letter, and it was one she now deeply regretted. Of all the stupid things to do. How could she have let her guard drop like that, even for the few seconds it took to slip an envelope under a door?

It would not be long until he found her, of course. She could not evade him forever; they had to work together. A sudden tide of panic crashed over her. Had she ruined their working relationship too? On top of everything else she had broken?

She poured herself a drink, her breath uneven, and tried to calm herself. There was no running from it now. She had trapped herself. Backed herself into a corner. And he held all the power. He could block her in for as long as he wanted to with this. “Don’t be wet,” she muttered to herself. She drained her glass and set about her typing.

The knock at her office door came. Randall walked in. He seemed to want to speak, but said nothing. Instead, he came up to her side and placed a hand upon her shoulder. She looked up at him. To her relief, he did not hate her. She deserved his contempt; he was just too decent to give it.

He handed her an envelope, her name on the front, without a word, and left.

Lix was petrified. She had known he would respond and that he would not do so verbally, but she had expected him to dump the letter on her desk, furious with her. It was difficult to know that he forgave her. She would have preferred his derision.

Whether it was courage or masochism, Lix could not be sure, but she did open Randall’s letter. In an instant, her heart went to her stomach.

_My dearest Lix,_

_You leave me with so many questions._

_I could not have taken your child away from you. You might not have had any faith in yourself but I have always trusted you. I trust you because I know you. To know the things you keep secret could never change that._

_I do not share your doubts about the kind of mother you are capable of being. No mother is perfect due to the simple fact that no human being is perfect. However, you possess a compassion, albeit quiet, which allows you the capacity to be a good mother._

_You are good enough. You always have been._

_I would like to understand why you felt this way but I know better than to force you to speak. Just know I will always listen without judgement. Anything you tell me will remain ours to keep. There is nothing you could tell me that would make me care for you any less. Nothing you could say would diminish my respect for you._

_It was always clear to me that something was there. I watched it eat at you. You would shake in the night. Do you remember that? There were nights you broke into cold sweats and your hands trembled. It was worst in the wind. Sometimes closing all the doors and all the windows helped. Sometimes nothing helped. I often think of you on a stormy night, and hope you aren’t having a hard time._

_My dear woman, what happened to you? What caused you such pain that you shake in the night? Who told you that you would not make a capable and loving mother? Who convinced you to believe you are not good enough? Who lied to you?_

_I cannot drag it out of you, nor would I want to. All I want to let you know is that if you ever want to tell me, you can. It may even free you._

_For the record, I would be overjoyed to find our daughter is like you, the intelligent, fierce, determined, loving, beautiful woman you are._

_Please do not belittle yourself. Do not lessen your own humanity. The only thing you accept praise for is your work, but there is so much more to you than your professional achievements. They are great achievements, it is true, but they are not the foundation of your personhood. You were Lix Storm long before you made her name known. I think you forget I know that._

_You are a human being. A good human being._

_All my love,  
Randall_

Lix bowed her head and tried to hold in her tears. His words slashed through her like a knife. It would have been easier if he hated her. She knew how to deal with that.

She thought he would have forgotten the sheer terror the sound of a howling gale put through her. It was an insignificant detail among the chaos. But he remembered. He remembered how she had fallen to bits, broken by the weather. In those moments, she had not been warm and cared for in bed with Randall. She had been that scrawny little girl who cowered in the corner of the game shed at night, dead pheasants hanging above her head as the wind rattled the windows. How she had dreaded those trips to stay with her grandparents. She trembled violently at the thought of it, even now.

There was nothing she could do to prevent it coming; she burst into harsh sobs and leaned forwards with her face in her hands.

“Idiot,” she hissed at herself. “Get a grip on yourself!”

She dug her nails into the back of her hand. It, at the very least, dragged her back into adulthood. The discomfort reminded her she was in her office in London, that she was no longer a child, that she would never have to sit in that shed again. She never had to do any of it again.

Her eyes drifted down to that letter once more, drawn to the parts she found hardest to digest.

_I trust you because I know you._

_You are good enough. You always have been._

_My dear woman, what happened to you?_

The dam was cracked. Perhaps it had been cracked for years. Decades. But now the water trickled through, the pressure too much for even Lix Storm’s barricades to contain. Time was no healer; she knew that better than most. All time did was allow her to be changed by her own pain while it grew and forever changed its shape, never to be beaten.

Fumbling as her hands shook, Lix dragged some paper and a pen to her grasp, and she tried to be brave.


	3. The Small World

Randall, as he left the building, felt a hand pull him aside, where they would not be seen, just as the cool night air hit his face. “Lix?” he said, surprised to find it was her face in front of him. Her eyes were red, like she had been crying, or drinking. Maybe it was both. She looked shaken.

Lix leaned up a little and pressed her lips to his cheek. She leaned into him; he put his arms around her and held her close, for he knew she would not do this unless she was suffering. “Don’t hate me,” she whispered into his shoulder. She put an envelope in his hand.

He pushed her back gently so he could see her face; she had been trying to hide it. “I don’t think I ever could,” he said to her sincerely.

With a sad smile, she said, “Don’t speak too soon.”

How was he supposed to convince her that he could not hate her? To look at her now, he could probably have told her he loved her and she would not believe him. He touched her face. She flinched. She caught it before it was anything huge but she definitely flinched. What was she thinking about that made her startle at his touch? She knew he would never even think to harm her. He knew she knew that.

However, he felt the need to remind her. “I won’t hurt you,” he said quietly to her.

She nodded her head. For a moment, he thought she was going to say something, but she kept quiet until she said, “Goodnight, Randall,” and walked away.

He looked down at the letter. The handwriting was different, like her hands had been unsteady as she wrote. It was best to wait until he was in his car to open it, as he could not know what the envelope contained. So he went to his car, shut the door, and looked at the envelope. He could see it fine, under the lights outside.

There was really no excuse not to open it, but the thought of seeing what she had written filled him with dread. It wasn’t what she might say about him that worried him. It was what she might say about herself.

Still, he opened it. The first thing he noticed, before reading anything at all, was that there were smudges where drops of water had made the ink run.

_Dear Randall,_

_I am sorry, both for then and for now. I had no right to ask that of you twenty years ago, any more than I have the right to burden you with the knowledge of it now. It was incredibly selfish of me to even consider putting you in that position._

_You remember those incidents. How embarrassing. I had thought (or hoped) they would have been of little importance to you. Compared to the wars raging on outside our door, what did it matter if I proved to be useless whenever a gale blows?_

_If you knew, Randall, it would hurt you. There are certain things a woman must bear alone. Suffice it to say that my upper-middle class upbringing was not the idyllic fairytale one might presume it to have been. Let us not break the ice on that particular muddy puddle. The stains may never was out, for either of us. Just trust me when I tell you my fears about my inherited traits are not baseless._

_I should never have given you that letter. I should have disposed of it at the time. Even I am unsure of why I have held on to it all this time. Sometimes I think I only wanted to remember I loved you and trusted you deeply enough to write it in the first place. I like to try and convince myself that you loved me in return but I know it would be difficult to find any love at all for someone like me. You will always try to do right by me because you are a thoroughly decent man, not because you actually love me._

_Please do not understand my meaning back then. I love our daughter. That was the reason I wanted you ask you to protect her from me. The knowledge that I might have been a monstrous mother drove me, not a lack of love for her._

_It must surely sound ludicrous now but I used to talk to her when I was pregnant. I told her I loved her. I told her you loved her. I told her she had to go and be with other people because we loved her. I told her I would find her a good mother and I would make sure she was not stuck with me. There is not a single day passes when I do not think of her. All I wanted for her was a good life, and that meant her life had to exclude me._

_I couldn’t do to her what they did to me. I couldn’t even risk the possibility that I was that kind of parent. She would have ended up like me: an alcoholic who cannot be loved. Scared of her family, scared of the wind, scared of anyone who claims to love her. I did not want her to be scared._

_I’m scared, Randall. People think it’s the big bad world we have to be scared of, but it isn’t. It is the small world. The one in which we grew up, in which we love and lose and hate and hurt. The world where our ghosts live, that is the world we fear. I always was scared. I think you knew that, didn’t you? Give me a war, I’m fearless. Give me love, I’m terrified. Or the wind, as it so happens._

_The wind. I hate the wind. At least when I had you, it was interrupted._

_When the wind blows, and the windows rattle, and the doors knock against their frames, and the trees rustle, and I can smell blood and mud and my own tears. And then the footsteps draw near. I don’t know if you ever realised that it was never you I cowered from. And the door hinge squeaks. The bloody man never did oil that shed door. He comes in with that gun over his shoulder._

_And then it isn’t him at all. It’s you. And you take me in your arms and tell me it’s alright. It’s only the wind. The wind can’t hurt me. You will keep me safe. You love me._

_But I cannot be loved. I’m too scared._

_That’s enough for now. I probably should throw this away right now, but I shall give it to you. I have to start somewhere._

_Lix_

Randall stared at it, horrified. He wanted to go after her. Again. He wanted to go after her and tell her she was safe and loved and nothing like that would ever happen to her again. And yet, he knew that would frighten her. She was choosing to communicate like this because she, ever the writer, did not know how to do it without seeing her words in front of her.

He was just going to have to work with that. These words wrenched at his guts. He had known she was scared. Anyone who saw her on those nights would have known that she was scared not just in that moment, but always. And he had known she did not retreat from him. She had no reason to; he had never laid a finger upon her that was not in love.

That love gave him the strength to do this her way. His instincts, at least for now, had to be put to one side, and he had to do this the way Lix wanted to do it.


	4. The Ghosts

No.

No.

No.

She was not doing this.

Lix was not sitting here, staring across her desk at Randall. She wanted to say something, but what could she possibly say to make what she had written sound any better? As always, she would open her mouth and make it so much worse.

Randall straightened the objects on her desk; to anyone else, it might have seemed absentminded, but Lix knew him better than anyone else. “Did your parents drink?”

That question was not on the list of those she had anticipated. “Um, no,” she said. “Well, yes, my mother did drink rather a lot. My father drank no more than the average man. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity.”

“It is _never_ just curiosity with you, Randall.”

“I wondered,” he said as he adjusted the papers by her typewriter, “whether you inherited your fondness for drink.”

“We all drink,” Lix said, looking down at the photographs she had been sent. “Except you. You’re the sensible one.”

“You told me your father died young.”

“He did. He was thirty-nine.”

“You were left with your mother?”

“When it suited her.”

Lix winced at how stiff her voice had become. This was why she seldom spoke of them; she was all too aware of how the subject affected her. She had no wish to remember those long weeks and months she was left with various relatives while her mother tried to get her act together. Had she appeared to have cared, Lix might not have concluded she was well aware she was throwing her daughter to the lions half the time. As it was, she had never seemed all too bothered.

She could remember her father when he fell ill. Always exhausted, always irritable, always in pain. Lix had tried not to blame him when he took that out on her. It couldn’t have been easy to endure. But her mother had been so very unhelpful. Even as an eight-year-old child, Lix had known telling a sick man to ‘just get over it’ was both cruel and impractical.

The moments passed in a vacuum of forty years.

She cleared her throat. “Was there something you wanted, Randall?” she asked politely.

From the inside pocket of his jacket, he produced an envelope. Lix fixated upon it, dreading what it might contain. She took it when he passed it to her, wondering again why she had ever started this in the first place.

It was something she needed him to know. He needed to know this to understand her, and why their daughter had to be so very far from her.

But it was not worth the pain it dragged up. Telling her story was tearing her apart, and she could not let him see that. He might think her weak.

“Lix,” he said abruptly. She looked up at him. “You’ve never been a bad person.”

He wanted to say more. It was so obvious. There were words waiting to pour out of his mouth like wine, but something stopped him. Lix glanced down at the letter in her hand and then back up to him. Really, she felt she had played the act of a lifetime if he could not see she was a terrible human being. Sarcastic, guarded, cowardly, caustic…she could list her flaws until the end of time and still have more to add.

Unable to give an adequate response to that, she placed the letter deliberately down in front of her. “I really must be getting on with this,” she said, gesturing down to her work.

“Of course.”

Once he was out of the room, Lix poured herself a drink; she waited until he left because she knew he hated how much she drank. “What a mess,” she muttered. “Stupid. How utterly stupid of me.”

The fragments of her heart crunched together and bled as she tore open the envelope.

_Lix, my love,_

_I cannot pretend to know what you were put through. All I know is how it affects you. For you to take attacks like those, triggered by what would not bother others, it must have been horrific. But whatever that man did to you, it was not your fault. Never your fault._

_There is no doubt in my mind that you love our daughter. That is clear to me. Our small worlds are filled with the cracks left by others, but none of those cracks diminished your worth or your love for your child. Not even the gaping holes could make you love her any less. I know that. Please do not think I would ever believe you don’t love her._

_You may not believe it but I have never thought your upbringing was in any way idyllic. I have learned you. I know your habits and your hatreds. There are things you block out and I have watched you do it. You love others but you do it quietly. Safely. Lix Storm knows how love can be weaponised. Most of the world will write your ways off as a product of fighting for your career and being caught in wars. I only know that to be false because I know you like they never will._

_The man, whoever he was, who made you fear the wind is gone. He cannot hurt you again. I hope that, one day, you can share what happened to you. I have my suspicions about what he did but I may be completely mistaken. Understand that his actions are not a reflection upon you. They never were. It was about him, not you. He is the monstrous creature. You are brilliant. In spite of him and all of his ilk, you are a brilliant woman._

_You need never be scared of me. It is perhaps easier for me to say than it is for you to do, I know, but I will never set out to hurt you. Come to me. Trust me with everything. I think you want to tell me. Somewhere inside you is that girl who wants to tell her story but cannot find someone to tell. You have found me. Tell your story, Lix. It is the most powerful thing you can do with it._

_These are secrets you do not need to keep. They are ghosts now. Ghosts cannot hurt us once we know what they truly are: powerless. Faded imprints of something that once roamed the Earth. They may haunt us for entire lifetimes, but they can never be us. They can never stand where you stand, with your feet on the ground and air in your lungs. You are real. Ghosts pale in comparison to you. Sometimes the best thing to do with a ghost is to turn and face it and walk it from your home. The more you run, the more power they have._

_My beautiful Lix, you can turn any ghost to the faintest mist._

_Randall_

She felt her face quiver.

Maybe Randall was right. It was time. Forty years was long enough.

All those incredible things he had written to her broke through that vacuum. He trusted her. He knew her and he trusted her anyway. There was only one place she wanted to be in this moment, and it was almost a compulsion to go that brought her to her feet.

It led her down the corridors. It took her knuckles to that office door. It guided her over the threshold when called.

“Lix?” Randall said.

Lix could not speak. If she tried, she knew nothing would come out. She simply walked to him.

Without any hesitation, he took her into his arms. Nothing was going to stop what was coming, so she stopped trying. Her tears flowed from her eyes and her sobs scraped through her chest. He held her. He gently rocked her from side to side.

And she was safe. She could not speak. She could not do. She could not be anything but this.

But with Randall Brown, she was safe.


	5. Truthful Deceit

Randall didn’t want to let Lix go home alone that evening. Something told him he shouldn’t leave her there alone. But she insisted. She had come to him but distanced herself quickly. He thought he could understand that. This was not a woman who easily let anyone see beneath the bravado, even him; it made sense to him that she might recoil in shame.

That was something Randall hated to see her feel. She had every reason to regret some of the events of her life but she did not deserve to feel shame over them.

Maybe that was why he stood outside her house now.

The house was large. Too large for one woman but her mother had left it to her and she had accepted it – he had been there to watch her loathe herself for accepting her mother’s will.

Its face was empty. A relic of history, the whole place was probably best abandoned to the past. The woman who lived between those walls, however, could not be condemned to what lay there.

The one thing he didn’t want to do was force her in one direction or another. That would mean her choices were not hers, and they had to be her choices. On the other hand, instinct brought him here. Randall Brown’s instinct was a fickle creature. He had instincts for journalism, politics, war, crime, people with obvious motives: money, power, reputation, a lover.

But people? People whose hearts could not find the basics of what a human being needed to survive? That was somewhere his instincts generally deserted him, leaving him in a vast wasteland of things people did that he could not comprehend alone.

So when instinct did bring him somewhere, he knew to follow it.

He knocked on the front door. It wasn’t particularly surprising to him when she did not answer. There was a key in a film canister hidden under the camellia bush. Randall bent down and felt around in the soil for it and let himself into the house.

“Lix!” he called out. It wasn’t that he thought she would come to meet him, more that he didn’t want to appear silently in front of her. It might frighten her.

His footfalls echoed against the hard floors as he made his way through her home. The house was clearly not lived in. It wasn’t a home. It was just her property, which she visited she could be bothered to do so, or else when it provided a convenient escape route.

He found her, in the end, in the half-lit study, after following the sound of the wireless through the building. There was little on the news programme she had not already seen today, but he rather thought it was there to drown the silence and not for the originality of its content. Lix sat at her desk, the one that had once belonged to her father, staring into nothing.

“Lix,” he said again. She did not look over to him. In fact, Randall wasn’t certain she was aware he had spoken to her. The bottles standing on the desk – one empty, one two-thirds full – told him she was quite, quite drunk. “Lix, are you okay?”

When he stepped in front of her and invaded her line of sight, she finally noticed he was there. “Randall,” she said. Her voice shook. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to make sure you’re alright. I had a feeling…” he began to explain, but suddenly felt foolish trying to verbalise an instinct he did not fully understand.

Lix rose unsteadily to her feet. Randall walked around to meet her, to see her face properly in this dim light. “I’m fine.”

“I’ve rarely seen you look less ‘fine,’ Lix.”

He glanced down at the desk. Across it, discarded pieces of paper with whole sides of writing crossed out were strewn. Balls of scrunched up paper littered the floor. Whatever she was trying to write, she was having difficulty, and that was not like Lix Storm. Writing was something she usually did with infuriating ease. He reached out to pull some of the paper towards him but she pulled his hand back.

“Randall,” she said, “you don’t need to worry.”

Her eyes, though unfocused, looked straight up into his face. He was lost. There was no way he could predict what she was going to do. She might throw him out, or she could exchange pleasantries until he gave up, or she might tell him the truth.

She did none of that.

She kissed him. Gentle and terrified, Lix kissed him. For a fraction of a moment, he did allow himself to fall into her. He took her in his arms like she had always been there. And then he realised what she was doing. Randall had known her for too long to fail to see when she was trying to manoeuvre him onto a different path.

Slowly, he trailed his fingers down from her neck to her back. From her shoulder blade down her side to her hip, where he rested for a moment. Guilt chewed at his mind for his deceit but he believed he was doing what was right. He kissed her as she kissed him; the passion and tenderness they shared was honest. It was in their motives for their wordless confession that they deceived one another.

Randall waited. When he was sure she was drunk enough and absorbed enough to react too slowly, he took his hand off her hip and grabbed a handful of the papers from her desk. Lix reacted by trying to catch his hand, but not before he had put a couple of feet between them. Even in this near useless light, he could see her face had paled.

He looked down to find the sheet on top of the pile he had snatched was neither the beginning or the end of what she had written, but something from the middle.

_why he despised me so. I had cousins who he adored. Who slept in beds while I was locked in a game shed._

_He would come in the night. The first few times, I was silly enough to be relieved that someone had finally come to let me out. I soon learned better. He did let me out eventually but I had to give him something in return. He would tell me I was tall and pretty and so much more grown up than my cousins and that he simply must have me. I understood what he wanted. Whether he got it was not up to me. He had a gun._

_When I was small, aged eight or nine, I knew what it was. I didn’t know exactly how it was wrong but I knew I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone. As I grew up, he stopped locking me away. I suspect that was only because I became too big to drag through the grounds. By then, though, he didn’t need to lock me away. When I was twelve, my grandparents gave me my own bedroom. My cousins still shared rooms. They justified it by saying it was because I was there far more often than my cousins – my mother was absent more than she was there and it was often my grandparents’ doorstep I landed on._

_This bedroom was on the south side of the house. My cousins all slept on the north side of the first floor when they visited. My grandmother did seem to really believe she was being kind by giving me a quieter space, especially as my cousins were young and rowdy; I don’t think she ever really knew what her husband was doing. Or maybe she knew and didn’t want to stop him._

_I knew why I was there. My grandfather chose that room for me._

_In return for that room, his expectations rose. I was older now, he would tell me, and there were new things I could do for him. I tried my luck and told him I would not do it. He laughed. Only he and I knew there was a shotgun in the back of the wardrobe._

_My mother found out in the end. She picked me up from my grandparents’ house and I stayed with her for a few months. I had a miscarriage while I was there. She asked how I ended up pregnant in the first place, being fourteen and never going out anywhere. I told her. She believed me._

_Three weeks later, she sent me back there._

_I still wonder why she did that. Sometimes I think she hated me enough to want me to suffer, for as far as I know, she never confronted my grandfather. Other times I think it didn’t matter where I ended up as long as she didn’t have to be the one looking after me. Whichever it was, it boils down to my own worthlessness and failings as_

Randall, his hands shaking, looked up.

Lix turned her head away.

“I don’t know what to say,” Randall admitted quietly. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“Don’t do this.”

“What?”

“Pity me.”

He didn’t get the chance to tell her what he was actually thinking, because she had walked away. He ran after her but she was already at the front door. “Lix!” he shouted down the street. “Lix, stop!”

Her drunkenness was obvious in her gait and her imbalance; she kept stumbling towards the road and every time she did, panic set about Randall like a vine around his throat.

“Lix!” This time he roared it. She stopped and turned around. He approached her cautiously, for if he startled her or upset her she might turn her back again. “Come here,” he said to her calmly. “Come back to the house and we can talk. Or not talk at all, if you’d rather.”

She was dazed. There was a look about her that made her seem to float between worlds, not quite tethered to any of them. But she did take a step forwards. And another. Randall halted his approach, thinking it better for her to come to him.

Perhaps six feet away from him, she stumbled. This time there was no regaining her balance. Lix fell to the ground and with a thump that curdled Randall’s stomach, her head hit the pavement.


	6. Darknesses

“There is a _reason_ she fights, Adela! She hates going to the house. I would happily have her here with me while you’re away.”

“Yes, because you’re in a fit state to watch a seven-year-old,” Adela Storm snarled. “Honestly, Benjamin, you ought to show more gratitude towards my parents and thank your lucky stars you married into a wealthy family. After all, you’re practically crippled. Useless. So useless, in fact, that the doctor doesn’t know what to do with you.”

Lix watched her parents through the crack in the door. Adela, her mother, was packing a suitcase; she was going to Italy with her sisters. Benjamin was leaning forwards, steadying himself on the footboard of their bed. Had Lix not known better, she would have expected his face to be pale when he turned.

She darted to the side, her back to the wall, so that her mother did not see her when she passed the door.

“Please,” said Benjamin. “You’re going for almost a month. Whatever it is, Lix doesn’t like going away. She’s always out of sorts when she comes back. Just let her stay.”

“No. Mother and Father want to see her. And don’t call her that. Her name is Alexis.”

Footsteps strode towards the door and Lix, long having acquired the sense to go barefoot in this house, silently dashed to her bedroom before Adela came out onto the landing. She probably wouldn’t have noticed her anyway, preoccupied as she was with packing for Italy, but Lix wasn’t willing to risk it.

After a few minutes, the bedroom door creaked open. Her father stood there, tall but quite obviously weakened by whatever made him so unwell, an apology written across his face.

“You tried,” said Lix. “Thank you.”

Benjamin took her small white hand into his; it was only when she saw her skin against his that she realised how tanned he had become, and how the veins in the back of his hands and on his forearms seemed to pattern themselves so clearly like marble.

The room went dark.

No Benjamin. No Adela. No being dragged out to that house. No weeks of exhaustion and dread. No punishment for her sour face when Adela eventually returned.

Nothing.

Sleep wanted to take Lix in this darkness. Something told her to resist it, for now.

Why was it all dark?

Where was her family?

“I’m her husband.”

What? She had never married. Had she?

“She was a bit drunk. Lost her footing and fell.”

What was this man talking about?

“How hard did you see her hit her head?”

A woman. A nurse?

“It looked like a fair smack to me.”

A Scot. The man was a Scot. Lix couldn’t remember marrying a Scot.

She had loved one, though. She remembered she had loved a Scot.

Hadn’t she lost him?

Black.

Nothing.

How long was she here? It felt like years.

“Liver failure.”

“What?”

“Mrs. Storm, I’m afraid to say your husband’s liver is failing. His heart is also weak.”

“Do something.”

It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t a plea. That had been a direct order, and one the doctor had been unable to carry out. “I don’t think you quite understand what I’m saying,” the doctor said kindly. “I cannot do anything. Nothing which might prolong your husband’s life.”

“He’s going to die,” Lix said. How it infuriated her that, at the age of ten, she understood the doctor better than her mother did. “He’s going to die and there is not a single thing any of us can do to stop it from happening.”

“He doesn’t drink very heavily at all!” Adela said angrily. “I drink more than he does. How can he have liver failure?”

“There are other reasons a liver might fail. Infection, for instance. However, in your husband’s case, I would place my bets on a metabolic disorder.”

“Are there any tests you can do?”

“One. However, it is invasive and will not improve his prognosis. No doctor would be willing to put your husband through it.” Adela raised an eyebrow but the doctor held her stare. “Regardless of the fee offered.”

“And what is this prognosis?”

“It has been close to five years since your husband first fell noticeably ill. You must understand that he has already far outstripped the prognosis I gave him then.”

“How long?!” shouted Adela.

“Weeks. Months, if he is as bone bloody stubborn as he has been thus far.”

Lix simply walked away; when Adela worked herself into a frenzy like this, it was always better to walk away from her if it was possible. How was it Lix could accept this, but Adela – her mother, a grown woman – seemed to refuse to? Of course Lix hated it. She hated knowing her father was dying, but she had been prepared for this for half of her life. She had watched him fall unwell, then grow sicker with every passing month and year, until he now lay in bed with his organs plotting to kill him.

She went to her father, to the bedroom, and climbed up onto the bed beside him. From even here, they could hear Adela shout at the doctor. “I’m so sorry,” said Benjamin.

“You can’t help dying,” Lix said bluntly.

“I suppose that’s true,” Benjamin said with a slight laugh. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It is simple. None of us have any choice, which makes it the simplest thing in the world.” Lix twisted the cloth of her jumper between her fingers and thumbs. “It’s the only good thing about being forced to do something: it really is very simple.”

Benjamin’s hand caught her arm gently. She looked at his bronzed face; the black marks beneath his eyes more pronounced than ever. “Is there anything you need to tell me, Lix?” he asked her.

“Like what?”

“Anything. Maybe why you hate going to the big house so much?”

She almost said it. The words almost fell out of her mouth but she caught them just in time. “No,” she said. “It’s just boring there, that’s all. They make me clean the guns when I’d rather read.”

Adela strode into room. With the bang of the door, the lights went out. Darkness took her in its arms again.

Sometimes Lix thought she could hear them. People. Talking in the darkness. That Scot. A woman with quite a soft voice she felt she had heard before. The voices of strangers who spouted facts and reality.

Other times, she knew she must have imagined it. She was dreaming. This was one of those dreams in which one felt themselves conscious when they were asleep. It was the mind playing tricks on her.

“Your wife has had a seizure.”

“A seizure?”

“Yes. This indicates to me that she has sustained a significant head injury and that her brain is most likely bruised. The swelling caused by that injury may reduce on its own, without any invasive intervention. What we’re going to do is induce a coma and give the brain the opportunity to heal itself. We shall check her progress and if the problem doesn’t correct itself, the surgeon will attempt to correct it for her.”

“Surgery.”

He sounded terrified, that Scot. That fear and that voice did not ordinarily go together.

“Yes. We will keep your wife closely monitored, on the look out for any further complications.”

Were they talking about her? Surely they couldn’t be referring to her – she was nobody’s wife. But if not her, who? It had to be her, or why else would she hear them speak? And now that terror in the Scot’s voice moved her own conscience, limited as it was by her inability to wake.

“You pull yourself through this, Lix Storm,” the Scot said. “You pull yourself through this and I will be here when you wake.” His voice fell to a whisper and he added, “And when you wake, you can murder me for masquerading as your husband. I just couldn’t bear the idea of you sitting here alone. I told a lie. And you are going to wake up with the ability to wring my neck for it.”

Was she? Because it didn’t feel like that at the moment.

Drowsiness pulled her under. This darkness was new.

It was a void.


	7. She's Going to Die

Randall sat at Lix’s bedside, the newspapers pilled neatly on the unit beside him. He had read every important piece of news out to her because, for all she was unconscious, he could not escape the feeling she might be irritated if he didn’t try to keep her informed. “Oh, well, Lix,” he said, placing the last paper onto the pile. “There we have it. The world is as mad as ever.

He reached out and took her hand. “Miss Rowley, Mr. Lyons and Mr. Madden all send their best wishes,” he told her quietly. “Miss Rowley will be in to visit you tomorrow.”

A nurse came into the room, adjusted Lix’s drip, and said, “The doctor will come in a few minutes, Mr. Brown. He needs some information from you.”

Randall inwardly panicked, but nodded his head and thanked the nurse. After all, he was lying to the faces of all these medics. What if they had finally worked out they were not married? He had fobbed them off by telling them Lix wore her wedding ring around her neck because she worked in a place where an obviously married woman was likely to be spoken down to. They had appeared to believe him at the time. Had they looked at her history and realised she mentioned no husband?

The doctor did come, and he didn’t ask a single thing about their marital status. Randall got to his feet.

“Mr. Brown,” he said. He shook Randall’s hand. “I’m Dr. Winterton, the doctor in charge of your wife’s treatment.” He opened a file. Randall’s first clenched involuntarily; it was never a good sign when a person began a conversation with opening a file. “We have the results of her latest blood tests, and some of the results are a little concerning. Has your wife mentioned feeling unwell recently?”

“No,” said Randall. “She seemed well enough. She wasn’t complaining of any ill health, anyway.” He refrained from adding that she was nearing the verge of a nervous breakdown; he rather thought Lix might take exception to finding herself in a locked ward when she woke.

Dr. Winterton made a gruff sound. Randall couldn’t be sure what it meant.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, given the results of her liver function tests, she shouldn’t be feeling well at all.”

“Lix doesn’t complain,” said Randall. “She’s the type who could lie on her deathbed and tell you she feels fine.”

“Does she drink, Mr. Brown?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

Randall hesitated. He didn’t want to say she was dependent on alcohol. “More than most, but not as much as some. Not as much as I once did.”

“She’s functional?”

“Most definitely. She’s a journalist, and her work has never been anything less than impeccable. She wouldn’t manage that if she was in a permanent drunken stupor, would she?”

Dr. Winterton looked at him for a minute, and Randall thought he knew what he was thinking: building a tolerance to heavy drinking was not a positive achievement. “I suppose not, no.” He looked down at the folder again, frowning. “From these numbers, and given your wife’s age, there is another possibility. Tell me, do you know how her relatives died? Anyone who died prematurely? Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles who died before their time?”

Now fear began to consume Randall. “I know her father died in his thirties, when Lix was just a child.”

“Do you know how he died?”

“No, she never told me. I get the impression she doesn’t know either.”

“I see,” said the doctor. He scanned the contents of the file again. “Well, that information would solidify my theory. I believe your wife may have hereditary haemochromatosis.”

Randall suddenly found it very difficult to stand straight. He didn’t know what that was but it sounded serious. Dr. Winterton seemed to imply this had killed Lix’s father, and Lix’s father had been younger than she was now when he died.

Lix was going to die.

“It’s an inherited condition which causes the body to absorb too much iron from the food we eat,” explained Dr. Winterton. “That build up of iron takes place over years, and if it isn’t treated, it can cause joint problems and organ failure. Typically, women don’t know they have it until they reach the menopause, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the monthly blood loss may shave just enough off their iron levels to keep them from becoming obviously ill. The second is that many women who do experience the symptoms of carrying too much iron – fatigue, mood swings, depression, joint pain, abdominal pain, feeling weak – will write it off as menstrual or hormonal symptoms and ignore it. As you’ve noted that your wife is a stoic woman, I would say it may well be the latter.”

“Organ failure.”

That was what Randall took from this. Lix had a condition which could cause her internal organs to fail. Lix was going to die. Even if she woke from this coma, she was going to die.

“If untreated, it may do enough damage to the heart and liver to cause them to fail, yes.”

“How is it treated?”

“Blood letting is the only standard treatment. In extreme cases we may use chelation therapy, but it the side effects are unpleasant.”

“Blood letting doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, either,” snapped Randall. Dr. Winterton was taken aback enough for Randall to notice even in his labyrinth of terror. “I’m sorry.”

Dr. Winterton waved away his apology. “This is a genetic condition, Mr. Brown. Your wife inherited it from one or both of her parents. Your children will need to be made aware of the possibility that they might have it, or carry it, too.”

Randall froze. A knife, blunt and rusted, seemed to drag itself through his chest. What was he supposed to say? They had a daughter but they didn’t know where she was? Tell him there was no way of informing their child she may have inherited this thing?

“We don’t have children.”

“Alright,” Dr. Winterton said. Maybe he could see something in Randall that betrayed his anguish, for he reached out and patted his shoulder. “The main thing is that your wife can be treated now. With blood letting and lifestyle changes, there’s no reason she can’t manage the condition.”

“Lifestyle changes?”

“Iron rich foods like red meat will only worsen the problem. Alcohol increases iron absorption so she will need to cut that out too.”

Another thing to panic over: Lix was either unable or unwilling to be sober. It was one thing to know her habit was unhealthy for her mind, and not ideal for her body, as it was for anyone. It was another entirely to know that to continue it might kill her much faster than he had ever feared.

“If you have any questions, Mr. Brown, please ask them, even if they come to you later on. For now, I’ll leave you with your wife.”

The doctor left the room. Randall sat back down.

He dared look at Lix and instantly regretted it. He hadn’t let himself see how broken she looked as she lay unconscious; he knew his heart couldn’t take it. And now he knew that even if she survived this, if her brain injury didn’t kill her, the contents of her own blood would. A cruel twist of fate had given her a body that malfunctioned under the influence of the only thing she had found to keep the scars left by her family closed up.

The combination of abuse and a faulty gene was going to take her from him.

But the doctor said the iron problem was treatable, hadn’t he.

_Yes_ , said a scathing voice in his head, _but what are the odds of a fool like you being able to get her sober? Why would she even listen to you? You’re nothing to her._

That was a fair point. She was too far gone to stop drinking without help, in too much pain to want to seek the help, and too guarded to let him offer the help – or even to want him around. After all, she had landed in here in the first place because she had tried to get away from him.

Lix was going to die.

And it was his fault.


	8. Selina and Edwin

“Get up, Alexis.”

Lix sat crouched in the corner of her parents’ bed, her back against the footboard. Whatever she had said to her father about the inevitability of death, she had not been prepared to be there when it took him. She heard her mother speak, but it didn’t register with her exactly what Adela wanted from her.

He was still warm. Somehow she thought he would go cold in an instant. And his skin was still that greyish bronze colour that had been deepening for years. He hadn’t turned pale. Not yet, anyway. Part of her wanted to ask if he would lose his colour. The other part knew better.

“Get up!” shouted Adela. “The doctor is on his way and the last thing I need is him seeing you looking like this!”

“He said he was taking a nap,” Lix heard herself murmur. “He was only going to sleep.”

“Yes, well, I think we can be quite sure that was not the case,” Adela snapped as she straightened the covers on the vacant side of the bed, where Lix had lain next to Benjamin. “Now would you sort yourself out before the doctor arrives?!”

“I thought it wouldn’t bother me. I was expecting it.”

“Alexis!” roared Adela furiously. Lix jumped, startled by the sudden bout of rage. “Get up, wash your face and stop this nonsense!”

Only when Adela told her to wash her face did Lix feel the tears streaming down her face. She had done that before, at some point, as an adult.

As an adult? She was a child. Nobody _remembered_ being an adult.

“How is she doing?” asked a voice. A woman’s voice, a woman she knew with auburn hair and big blue eyes. How did she know that? She thought her voice came from behind the bedroom door.

“Still comatose,” said another. The man. The Scot she loved. “Have you brought her things?”

“Yes, in the bag,” said the woman. “She looks…I don’t know. I thought she’d look peaceful but she doesn’t, does she?”

Of course she wasn’t peaceful. Where was there any peace to be had? What strange world did this girl live in? “I think she’s dreaming. Her eyelids twitch, you see?” said the man. “I dread to think what she’s dreaming of.”

“I agree. Look at her face. That’s the face of a woman who’s about to burst into tears.”

The light faded around Lix. The world turned beneath her while she sat still. Then it dropped.

The world beneath her vanished and she fell through the darkness until she found herself in a dimly lit drawing room. “Please, Mother, just take her. I cannot bear to be around her,” Adela said from the hallway outside. What had she done wrong this time? “She doesn’t understand.”

“She is a _child_ , Adela!” Lix’s grandmother, Selina, hissed. “And she is more like Benjamin than she was ever like you.”

Selina advocating for Lix? She didn’t think it ever happened again, and it certainly had never happened before.

“You know what she’s like then!” spat Adela. “She will do nothing but read. And she speaks so bluntly about the whole thing. Not an ounce of subtlety in her.”

“Much like her father. How can you love in Benjamin the same traits for which you hold Alexis in such contempt?” Selina asked. Lix looked at her bags on the floor. She should have seen this coming. “Leave her here, then. Go away and do whatever it is you need to do.”

Lix got to her feet. There was a book she remembered. One she had taken from a Scotsman’s office. But it was not on these shelves. She almost laughed at her own stupidity; it couldn’t be on these shelves, for it had not yet been published. It would be published later. During a war, she thought. But they’d already had a war, had they not? Her father had fought in it.

War. She remembered a lot of war. People speaking in Spanish and French and German. And a baby. She gave birth to a baby once. Where was that baby? Lix had left her somewhere, for the baby’s own good. Even now, she felt the scar on her heart pulling itself apart.

Selina walked into the room. “Your mother is going away for a few weeks,” she said briskly. “She asked me to tell you she loves you and she will see you soon.” It was a lie, and Lix knew it, but Selina was in an unenviable position of trying to spare a child’s feelings. “If you go and find your grandfather, he has some new books for you. I think he’s cleaning the guns.”

Fear shot through Lix at the prospect, for she knew what happened when she went to get those books. But Selina smiled benevolently and something dawned on Lix which she had been trying to figure out for about forty years: her grandmother didn’t know. Nobody had ever told her what monster she had married, had they? She really thought she was sending her granddaughter for her favourite things – books – while she gathered together the belongings Adela had dumped on the floor.

Lix was going to tell her. In her head, the words spewed out, about the shed and the guns and the things her grandfather made her do. What came out of her mouth, however, was, “Yes, Grandma.”

Selina left the room. Lix could not. She sensed a barrier through which Selina had passed but which Lix would never find, let alone break. So she watched Selina leave, knowing now that she – the one person who might ever have done something to end the living nightmare in that house – never knew exactly what went on.

The walls grew dim, the paintings fading and the ornaments vanishing, until all Lix knew was that Scot again. “She was drunk,” he said.

“Lix usually is drunk to some degree,” said another man. This man was younger, and his voice was one she knew from a television studio. “It’s part of her inimitable charm.”

“More drunk than usual.”

“Ah.”

Lix faltered in her dance through darkness. Was she an alcoholic? They talked like she was never sober.

“I should never have let her leave her house like this.

The younger man laughed slightly. “If Lix was going somewhere, she was going and that was the end of the discussion. I think you know as well as I do. It isn’t your fault at all, Mr. Brown.”

“If only you knew, Mr. Lyon,” sighed Mr. Brown. “If only you knew.”

Brown. Lix remembered that name. She remembered it on a certificate. A marriage certificate? She was certain she had never married. A birth certificate?

The baby. He was the father of her baby. She had loved him and she had given birth to his child.

Where was the baby?

Gone.

Lix had left her somewhere safe. Somehow she knew she wouldn’t have been a very good mother. She would have been just like Adela.

There was a letter, wasn’t there? To that man. Randall. Randall Brown. She had asked him to take her baby from her and go. Or she wanted to; she didn’t think she gave him the letter in the end.

And here he was. With her. Somewhere outside this pit of time, he was with her still.

“Alexis.”

The gun room was somewhere Lix never liked to be. Her grandfather, Edwin, did not need a gun in order to be terrifying. “Grandma sent me for books,” Lix said. She hated how her voice quaked, but she could do nothing to stop it. The man froze her blood.

“In the cabinet on the landing,” Edwin said. He never lifted his eyes from the gun he was cleaning.

“Thank you.”

Lix wanted to run. _Get out_ , she urged herself. _You know what happens next. Get out before he can call-_

“Alexis,” Edwin said. “Come and clean the wellington boots.”

_No. Don’t. You know what happens when you go back._

But she had no control. She was only an observer within her own childhood vessel. These were memories, after all. “Yes, Grandpa,” she said quietly. And so she picked up the brush and started knocking mud off the boots. Waiting. All she could do was wait. She knew the moment he broke the silence, the moment she looked up to find him standing over it.

That moment came, of course, as she knew it must.

_Help_. She wanted to scream. Scream for Selina. For Randall. Even for Adela, for as blind an eye as she tended to turn, she would not witness the attack in silence. But of course, there was no scream. Not from this body, anyway. Nobody saw her tremble as he drew closer, or recoil when she saw his button undone.

Nobody knew. Not yet. Someone knew in the future, she thought. She recalled an argument, an ache to let the story be told but the terror of feeling the whole thing again. The fear that this person may hate her for burdening him with the knowledge, or see her as weak or tainted or damaged. Waves of courage and backwashes of cowardice in turns, until they overlapped and she could no longer distinguish one from the other.

Darkness like water submerged her. “Is she in pain?” a man asked. Not Mr. Lyon or Randall Brown, but another man she knew. A man who drank a lot, who got everyone flustered by showing up for work thirty seconds before he was due on air.

“I don’t know, Mr. Madden. If she is, I don’t think it’s extreme pain,” said Randall Brown.

“She looks like she’s in pain.”

A woman, the same woman who brought her bag, said, “That looks more like anguish than pain.”

Someone could see it. They saw the torment she felt every time she was dragged through a new memory, now old enough to understand what that little girl could not.

And yet, nobody could see _her_.


	9. Lightless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a note on pronunciation:
> 
> Antje: an-ch-ye

Randall had gone back to his office, relenting when the nurse told him to get a meal, a sleep and a shave. He had expected a mountain of work waiting on his desk for him but, aside from a file, a small stack of letters, and a few sheets of paper, very little had been left for him. He rather suspected Bel had been trying to keep what was passed to his desk to a minimum, for which he was grateful.

The letters were the first he went to; he wanted to see if there had been any news on finding Sofia. Nothing in the post, though. However, when he looked at the list of telephone messages, he found that someone had called regarding the matter. Twice. His heart beat faster as hope began to twist itself into him. Had he done it? Had he finally found their child? How brilliant it would be, to have Lix wake to the news that she could know how her daughter was doing.

He lifted the phone and called them back. When the person at the French Embassy picked up the phone, he said, “Hello. I’m returning a call made to me in regard to locating my daughter, Sofia Manfrand. My name is Randall Brown.”

“Ah, yes,” said the woman on the phone. “We believe we have found her. I can make an appointment for you and your wife to-”

“My wife is in hospital,” Randall blurted out. It came before he meant it to, overprepared as he was to tell truth and lie in the same sentence. “She had an accident.”

“I am sorry to hear this, Mr. Brown,” the woman said sincerely. “I may give you some details here over the phone, if you would like.”

“Yes. Please.”

“We have found a Sofia Manfrande, though it is spelled with an ‘e,’ aged nineteen.”

“There’s no ‘e.’”

“These things are often transcription errors from one document to another,” she assured him. “It is very common for different spellings to come up. She was born on the twenty-fourth of July, 1939.”

Randall hesitated and, though he knew his daughter’s birthday by heart now he had seen what it was, went into the drawer to find the notes he had taken from the birth certificate before giving it to his contact. That little bit of hope he had allowed for himself crashed into the ground. “June. She was born in June, not July.”

The silence cracked down the phone line, hurting Randall’s ear as it came through. “Of course. We will try again. Do not be disheartened, Mr. Brown. There are often false leads in this kind of search.”

“I know,” he assured her. “Thank you.”

He hung up the phone before the woman got the opportunity to answer him, and before his despair allowed itself to show. They never would find her, would they? Even if they did, Lix was in a coma. How was he supposed to explain that to the child he had never known? How could he have been so stupid as to believe that he was cut out for any of this without Lix by his side?

Without shaving, sleeping or eating at all, Randall got back up and headed out to the hospital again. He didn’t know what good he did there, either, but he trusted that Bel had control over her production. If she didn’t, she would have said so by now. That freed him to go to Lix, whether it was helpful or not. All he knew was he loved her; that surely had to count for something in this world. Maybe it was pointless. He might well be wasting his time. However, he felt it better to go in hope that it would make a difference, rather than stay away and miss that chance.

The drive was endless. For being in the very same city, he felt as though Lix had never been further away.

What was the point? She probably didn’t even know he was there. Maybe he had to do something else.

Almost involuntarily, he turned right off the road towards the hospital. He still had the key. The history lurking in that house would tell its own stories; she had always kept him away from there as much as she could, and he was sure her reasons made sense to her. As he parked outside the house, he suddenly felt like a burglar, breaking into a home.

But he wasn’t. He loved Lix. That was why he went looking for answers. Not to take away her agency, but to try and fill in the gaps so he might understand. Who were her grandparents? Was she right when she believed her grandfather did this only to her, or was the man just good at keeping his abuses hidden? Did anyone in the family, apart from her mother, know? Was there anyone with whom she was still in contact? Anyone at all who might be able to explain to him the kind of upbringing which had got her to this point?

Randall got out the car and unlocked the front door. The place was lightless. Daylight broke through the windows, of course, but it touched nothing.

On a sideboard in the hall, there was a telephone; next to it was an address book. He flicked through it. She had a habit of marking people down as Aunt Florence or Uncle Reuben. He wondered why she never outgrew that. The ones with family attachments had names he would never have seen in his family. Randall’s own name had been outlandish by his family’s standards, and he had only been given it because it was his paternal grandmother’s maiden name and his father was supremely bored of hearing names like Robert, James and George by the time he came along. While his cousins were called Jean, Margaret and John, Lix had cousins called Rosetta, Stacia and Zachariah.

He placed the book down perfectly parallel to the telephone and went to the study. The desk was still in a mess, covered with papers containing scored out confessions and second-guessed judgements.

None of it made for light reading. It detailed some of the horrors of growing up in that family, from the way Lix’s mother treated her when her father died, to how her grandfather would lock her in the shed, to how she was isolated from any potential allies.

_Mother put distance between me and the rest of the family, apart from my grandparents. I don’t think she wanted her siblings to know what kind of parent she was. I only saw my cousins when we were all at the house or when my mother could not think of a way out of going to a gathering – birthdays, Christmas, weddings and funerals. Apart from Stacia and Rosetta. For some reason, after Stacia’s fifteenth birthday party, they stopped coming to the house unless with Aunt Naomi or Uncle Joseph, and they never slept over again. Stacia went out of her way to keep in touch. Or maybe that was normal and I was simply too accustomed to seeing too little of my family. She wrote me letters when she knew I had to stay at the house. We were the closest in age and she knew I was on my own. I wonder if Aunt Naomi knew? She and my mother were close but Naomi did say, when Mother died, that she offered to take me in, at least part-time, when my father died, but Mother insisted on her own arrangements._

Randall frowned. Why, if all Lix’s cousins had been treated with respect, did two of them stop visiting their grandparents alone? Could she be wrong in thinking her grandfather harmed only her? Perhaps Rosetta and Stacia had parents who decided the house wasn’t safe for them. Or, more likely, one inhabitant of that house. Maybe Naomi knew of the grandfather’s abuse.

He went back to the phone. In the address book, he found Stacia’s address. She lived in Highgate, so Randall lifted the phone to get through to the correct exchange. “Hello,” he said when someone answered, “could you put me through to Miss Stacia Welbourne, please?”

“One moment, sir. Connecting you now.”

In three rings of the phone, a woman answered, “Hello?”

“Hello,” he said. Suddenly nervous, he pushed the address book parallel with the phone again. “May I speak with Miss Stacia Welbourne?”

“Just a second,” said the woman. Randall noted the Hull accent as she called out, “Stacia! Telephone!”

“Who is it?” asked a woman – she must have been Stacia – in the distance.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

A muffled noise came through the line as Stacia took the phone from the other woman. “Stacia Welbourne speaking,” she said.

Randall swallowed hard. There was no turning his back on any of it now. “Hello. My name is Randall Brown. You don’t know me; I’m a friend of your cousin, Lix. I’m afraid she’s had an accident.”

“Is she alright?” asked Stacia. There was no way of avoiding the worry in her tone.

“She’s in hospital,” said Randall, “where they’ve induced a coma.”

“Can I visit?”

“I see no reason you can’t. However,” he added, realising with a jolt that he might sound completely insane in a moment, “I told the staff I’m her husband so I could stay with her. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t deviate from that story.”

There was a split second of silence before Stacia said, “Of course. I understand. If you tell me which hospital, I can meet you there at five o’clock.”

Randall almost smiled; Stacia was meeting him so she knew her cousin hadn’t got herself into anything problematic, other than a coma. “Excellent. I’d like the chance to talk to you about a couple of things.”

“Um…” Stacia said, suddenly hesitant. “Well, my…friend, Antje, she would like to accompany me. Lix knows her – they’ve been friends since we were teenagers.” She sounded like she was trying to justify something. “If you’d rather I didn’t bring-”

“No, of course Antje may come.” Part of Randall was simply glad for the fact that Lix had what seemed to be a friend, not linked by blood or romantic disaster.

“Thank you.” Even Randall could hear the relief in her voice. Anyone would think she was being given permission to bring her right hand into battle. “Five o’clock?”

“Five o’clock.”


	10. Stacia Selina Welbourne

“How did she hit her head?”

That voice. Lix Storm knew that voice. She had known it her entire life. It was one of the few she had never cut out from her world.

“She was walking on the street,” said Randall, “and she stumbled.”

“Drunk?” guessed the woman. A relative. One of the family was here. But one of the decent ones. There was no fear in hearing this voice.

“A little.”

“Should’ve known,” she answered, heaving a sigh. “Oh, Lix, when will you learn?”

Darkness suffocated her again. It pulled her back through her life.

She was out here in the garden. The lawn behind the house, where that godforsaken shed stood. Lix stepped out the door; she could hear the babble form inside the house even out here. How typical it was of Stacia to abandon her own fifteenth birthday party. Before Lix could open her mouth to call for her, she spotted her cousin around the side of the shed, with another girl. Joyce, her name was. They laughed together, and Lix hadn’t the heart to interrupt what was obviously a happy conversation. Those were so rare.

Lix smiled. She hoped to be as beautiful and as happy as Stacia someday. To have it in her to laugh without a care.

Though Stacia was two years older than her, Lix sometimes thought she was the more grown up of the two of them. Maybe it was merely circumstance – after all, Stacia still had both parents, and had a mother who wanted her. Perhaps she wasn’t forced into maturity.

Stacia leaned in and whispered something into Joyce’s ear. Joyce grinned. Stacia kissed her. They kissed properly, as lovers might. Lix almost gasped. Not because it was a girl Stacia kissed, for Lix could not care less about that, but because she had the nerve to kiss _anyone_ in their grandfather’s garden.

Stacia and Joyce broke apart for a brief second, only to giggle, before their lips met again. The ghost of that laugh echoed in her soul. She had done that. She remembered now. Lix had kissed Randall like this. Other men too, and even a few women, but nobody like Randall. It was he who had made her laugh like Stacia did now.

“Stacia Selina Welbourne! What the _hell_ do you think you are doing?”

His voice made Lix tremble. He marched out of the larder door and towards Stacia and Joyce. Stacia looked at him but then caught Lix’s eye; she whispered something to Joyce.

Joyce ran. Towards Lix. She came hurtling towards her and grabbed her arm, dragging her inside the house. “Joyce?” asked Lix. “We can’t leave Stacia out there with him.”

“She told me to run,” said Joyce, breathless from her sprint, “and to take you inside with me.”

“…daughter raised a whore!” Edwin roared. Lix tried to wrestle her arm out of Joyce’s grasp, for she had to go and get Stacia out of there, but Joyce was bigger and stronger.

“Lix, no!” she pleaded. “Stacia wants you in here, away from him!”

“Let me go, Joyce!” shouted Lix. Terror washed over her; what if Edwin hit Stacia? What if he really hurt her in his anger? Lix knew it was in him, after all the times he had hit her, or else held a gun to her. “We can’t leave her with him!”

“With who?” The girls stopped fighting and looked around. Stacia’s father, Joseph, was standing there. “With _who_ , Alexis?”

“With Edwin,” she mumbled, struck by the fact she could not lie. She could not do anything she hadn’t done the first time. And the first time she had used her grandfather’s first name, for she had wanted Joseph to know all was far from well.

“Where?” was the only thing Joseph asked.

He didn’t question her, or tell her it was ridiculous to say her grandfather couldn’t be trusted with his own grandchild. Looking into those dark green eyes, this time with a life’s wealth of experience behind her, Lix saw something she had not seen at thirteen: whatever Joseph knew about his father-in-law, he did not trust him.

“Outside,” said Joyce, “near the shed.”

Joseph Welbourne, taller, fitter, younger and definitely tougher than Edwin, stalked out the door and into the garden. “Stacia!” he called out. “Time for cake!”

Lix and Joyce looked at each other, both terrified. Joyce didn’t know what Edwin could do, but Stacia had told her to run, and Stacia would not tell anyone to run unless she felt it was unsafe to stay.

Minutes later, Lix’s chest deflated in relief. Joseph returned to them with Stacia’s hand in his. He, with a small but commanding smile, gestured silently for Lix and Joyce to follow them back into the party. Of course. How could she have missed that? He was making sure they were back into a communal space before Edwin could come and corner someone else with his rage.

Joseph understood it. Maybe not everything, but he knew enough to make sure he did not leave his niece or his daughter’s friend where they could be found alone and vulnerable to Edwin.

“He was horrible,” a voice said. Lix looked around but all she saw was the party. Selina coming through with a cake while they all sang. But the voice drowned the singing out and, as Stacia blew out her fifteen candles, darkness fell. “When he found out about…well, he saw me kissing a girl,” said the woman. Stacia. She recognised it now. Her voice had aged thirty years but it was her cousin. “He decided he was going to try and “make me normal,” but my dad caught him,” she sighed. “That was why my sister and I were never permitted to return alone.”

“That’s awful,” said Randall. He meant it. Lix could hear that he meant it, and wasn’t only condemning it because he knew he should. She had heard that disgust in his tone before. “I presume he’s dead.”

“He is,” said another voice. A Yorkshire accent. One Lix knew as well. “I suppose you’re thinking what I thought when I heard this.”

“What’s that?” asked Stacia.

“I hope he’s dead, ‘cause if he’s not, I’ll kill him,” said the woman. A moment of silence passed. “Sorry, Stacia, but it’s true.”

The blackness pulled her once again. Lix looked around her. This was the same hallway where she had listened to Selina fight Adela for a reason not to want her.

“It is true,” admitted Randall.

Lix peeked though the ajar door. Stacia was sitting in a chair, her parents standing over her, until Joseph sat down in the chair opposite her and her mother, Naomi, sat by the fire. “I’m sorry,” Stacia said tearfully. “I just…”

“We know,” said Naomi. “Don’t you think we have always known? From the dismissal you have had for the idea of a schoolgirl crush, because it involves a boy? From the way you look at Joyce? From how you would play your imaginary games about a wife and not a husband when you and Rosetta were tiny? We’ve always known you would be this way. And have we _ever_ tried to steer you away from it?”

“But it goes against God,” said Stacia. “It goes against nature. That is what Grandfather said.”

Naomi sighed. “I see it differently, Stacia,” she said. “So does your father. God made you this way. He would not have made you this way if it goes against nature or His own will. We are to trust in God, and to love what He made our daughter to be, however unconventional that may be. And frankly, not even God has the right to make a person in His image and then complain He dislikes it.”

“You are the same young woman you have always been,” said Joseph. “We love you not in spite of the fact it shall be a woman who stands by your side. We love that part of you too. We will love anyone you choose who treats you with tenderness and encouragement and love. We will love you, and we shall love her too, whoever she may end up being.”

“But Grandfather-”

“To Hell with your grandfather!” shouted Naomi. “That man has no right to make grand statements about what goes against God, or nature, or humanity!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why do you think I offered to allow Alexis to live with us?” asked Naomi. “Why do you think I ran away with your father at the age of seventeen? He is a nightmare in the flesh. I couldn’t bear to live with him any longer so I married my best friend. I probably would have married your father anyway, for I love him so, but I wasted no time because it got me out from under your grandfather’s thumb.”

Lix leaned back against the wall. She knew what that meant now. What had been done to her had been done to her aunt. At thirteen, she thought it was just Naomi saying their grandfather was above his station, that he was arrogant and he was domineering and he was demeaning. At Adela’s funeral, Naomi had told her she had tried to take Lix in when Benjamin died.

Now she knew why.

Naomi had never wanted to leave her there.

It wasn’t just Edwin’s temper which had been nightmarish. It was the same nightmare Lix had lived. Did Adela know that when she first left her child with the man? Selina didn’t. Lix was almost certain she never knew. But Adela? She couldn’t put it past her mother to have known the risk from the very beginning, after sending her back there after that miscarriage.

The one she was still to have.

It was only barely a year after this night.

“Come, Stacia,” Naomi said kindly. “To bed. We are all exhausted.”

Lix darted away from the door as she heard them get to their feet. As the door opened, she pretended to be walking down the hall. “Alexis?” Naomi called after her. Lix turned. “Are you alright, my dear?”

“Yes,” said Lix.

“Would you like to sleep in with Stacia and Rosetta tonight?” asked Joseph, glancing at his wife. “As a birthday treat. I know how Stacia loves your sleepovers.”

She smiled and nodded.

But inside, Lix frowned. This was the last night she shared with Stacia in this house. She never stayed overnight again, and nor did her sister. Stacia told Randall that their grandfather had “tried to make her normal.”

Tried.

Joseph had found him.

Trying.

Edwin had tried to do it to Stacia, too. To make her _normal_. Did he think that would ever make her want a man?

Behind her, a voice said, “She never knew.” Stacia. The older Stacia, the one sitting with her wife and Randall. “I didn’t tell her what he’d done because my mother told me not to. She thought it would upset Lix too deeply to know it.”

The family and the walls around them faded black.

“Lix thought she was the only one,” Randall said. “She felt singled out.”

“I think he did that deliberately,” said the other woman. The one from Yorkshire. “Think about it. He did it to Naomi, but not to Adela or Florence. He did it to Lix, and tried it with you, but not to Rosetta or your other cousins. The way he did that, he did it deliberately. He was isolating them. Making them feel like they were the only one, because if they were the only one, they were less likely to try and tell anyone.”

“The hallmark of an abuser,” Randall replied solemnly. “Isolate and destroy.”

“It was the only way he could be sure nobody would know,” said the woman. The wife. Anne? Anna? Annabelle? Anya? Antje? Antje. Her parents were German. “You were the only one who said anything about it, Stacia, and that was only because your dad saw it happen. And even they didn’t tell Selina, or the police. And why? Because he did this to your mum and made her think the world would trust him over any of you.”

If Lix could have cried, she would have. Her heart wailed as it bore the weight of conflicting emotions while swimming in the darkness around her.

Horrified that Stacia and Naomi had been hurt like she had been, but somehow relieved that she had not been the sole target.

Angry that Naomi hadn’t done more to rescue her, but saddened for her that she had been abused into compliance and silence.

Pleased they all cared enough to sit by her side, but terrified by the prospect of facing them.

Because, like everything else, she would have to face them eventually, wouldn’t she?


End file.
